Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.

Thursday, 17 July 2014

Andrew Cohen on the California Ruling

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney isn't the first federal judge in recent memory to declare the death penalty unconstitutional. And he surely won't be the last.

Still, Carney's ruling Wednesday vacating the death sentence of a California man named Ernest Dwayne Jones is as candid a judicial lament on the sorry state of capital punishment (in the state and in the nation) as you are ever likely to read.

If California can't or won't do the death penalty right, Judge Carney declared, it should not be allowed to do it at all. But his working theory isn't that the state's capital system is prone to error, or rife with racial disparity, or arbitrary in its application, even though it is plaintively all of those things. Instead, this appointee of George W. Bush concluded that the "machinery of death" grinds too slowly in California for it to sustain itself under the Eighth Amendment. Delay, he contends, is the decisive constitutional flaw in the grim mechanism.

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The StandDown Texas Project

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

Steve Hall

Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.